


Between the Stacks

by YamatoMyTomato (KinoKahn)



Category: Naruto
Genre: KakaYama - Freeform, M/M, security guard au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-27
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-15 10:18:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3443519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KinoKahn/pseuds/YamatoMyTomato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Yamato is the by-the-books security guard and Kakashi wears worryingly tight khakis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Stacks

When Yamato drove, he always steered with his hands at 10 and 2. Kakashi draped one wrist lazily at 11:30, eye barely on the sidewalk. Not even gripping the wheel. Yamato always gritted his teeth at that, tried to bite his tongue. He usually failed though, and scolded Kakashi. Kakashi just shrugged and they continued their golf-cart patrol around the shopping center.

 

He nearly always had his nose buried in a mass-market paperback copy of some terrible romance or erotica. He plucked one off the shelves at the beginning of his shift and nearly always finished it by the end. Never bought a copy. Just lounged around between bookcases reading. His tight-fitting turtle neck hitched up when he sprawled out, back against a bookcase and feet propped up on the third shelf of the bookcase across from him. If Yamato happened to look away from his post, in Kakashi’s direction, he could see the dip of his hipbone. Yamato always gritted his teeth at that, too. If Kakashi caught his eye, Kakashi would wiggle his shoulders and that one visible eye of his would sparkle with a grin. Obscene.

 

The way Yamato saw it, being a security guard for the largest bookstore in Konoha was an important task, to be performed with both honor and dignity. Kakashi had neither of those things. Truth be told, Yamato could more readily see him as the clerk at a local sex shop than as a security guard. Kakashi barely even followed the dress code; he just wore worryingly tight kakis and a turtleneck with his security badge safety-pinned on; his radio was clipped to the pocket of his pants instead of on is shoulder, where it belonged. He barely bathed for that matter, judging from the dingy shade of his grey hair. Never watched the front door, never escorted the cashiers to the cash room, never stopped by receiving to check in on Sai (who, blessed with the one job that didn’t require a dress code, typically wore running shorts and half-shirts), never confronted suspected shoplifters. Never really did his job.

 

Yamato wanted him. He wasn’t sure if it was in a sexual way, a romantic way, or just some sort of morbid fascination. He could probably figure it out if he dwelled on it long enough. So he didn’t.

 

Yamato and Kakashi were half-way through their afternoon golf-cart patrols of the complex. Yamato sat in the passenger seat, on high alert for any suspicious activity. Kakashi waivered back and forth between silence and loud laments about how he hoped the workers at the bookshop didn’t re-shelve the book he was reading.

“It’s a good book, probably the best I’ve read in the past two weeks,” Kakashi whined as he swerved the cart out of the way of a food stand.

“That food stand isn’t permitted to be that close to a fire hydrant, Kakashi; pull over so I can cite him.”

Kakashi didn’t seem to hear Yamato, and instead just kept driving and rambling about his book. Yamato slumped back in his seat, crossed his arms, and tried to look disinterested. It wasn’t hard for Yamato; his face was capable of portraying approximately five different expressions. Unlike Kakashi, who somehow managed to convey an array of emotions despite having a bandana covering his forehead and one eye and having the lower half of his face tucked into a turtleneck. Kakashi’s look was a strange one, and it bothered Yamato. But it didn’t bother him as much as it should have, and Yamato was well aware of that.

“It’s called _A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay_. You’ve gotta give it a chance just with a title like that. The plot’s fairly straight forward: the world economy has been taken over by dinosaurs, and our human protagonist, John, is a recent NYU grad looking for work. He gets picked up by a decent firm, but his boss is a dinosaur. You can guess where it goes from there – hot dinosaur-on-human office sex, the whole shebang. And it’s a pretty good story even if you just take it at face value, I’ll be honest. But thing is, it’s even deeper than that. It’s a story about acknowledging your differences, looking your prejudices in the eye. Realizing that maybe, maybe, you should set those differences aside for the sake of some really really hot supply closet sex. Are you even listening to me?”

Yamato didn’t budge, and instead continued to stare at the soda machine up ahead. Of course he was listening. He was always listening. It drove him insane in a way that kept him up at night and made him vaguely consider applying for a transfer.

But he just liked the kids who worked in this bookstore so much. The hyperactive blonde boy who yelled a lot (thank god it wasn’t a library), the slightly quieter girl with pink hair who was basically running the entire store despite being sixteen. The boy who pined after her and had gotten a bowl-cut just to emulate his favorite manager. The brooding guy who worked in the music section, however, Yamato could probably do without.

As they pulled up to the front door, Kakashi left Yamato to park the cart and lock it up as he raced back into the store to resume the garbage he called a book. Yamato liked books, he honestly did. He even owned quite an extensive library of carpentry handbooks. He just didn’t read them while working, and he certainly read higher quality books than what Kakashi did.

Most of the time.

Truth be told, more than once he’d ended up purchasing a novel Kakashi had told him about in one-sided conversations, just to see what all the fuss was about. He always brought them to the register in the music department, away from prying eyes like Sakura’s. She was a discrete girl and he trusted her to not tell all the employees about his reading material, but he also didn’t want to shock her with the hardcore gay erotica he sometimes ended up buying. However, the brooding bitter kid in the music department didn’t say a word. He just angrily shoved the books into plastic bags and held his hand out for the cash.

The books were terrible. Yamato read them cover to cover.

 

By the end of the shift, Yamato was fidgeting with hunger. He had spent his lunch break filling out all the logs Kakashi had been neglecting for the week, and didn’t trust himself to eat without getting food stains on the form. Kakashi, of course, spent his lunch break finishing _A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay_ and subsequently leaning against the bookcase nearest to Yamato complaining loudly about the disappointing cliffhanger ending.

Yamato wasn’t sure how a book with that kind of plot and content could have a cliffhanger ending, so he added it to his metal list of books to buy with his next paycheck. Just so he could understand Kakashi the next time he talked about the book. Which was likely never. Kakashi was typically only infatuated with a book for a single day and then quickly forgot about it, with the notable exception of _Make-Out Paradise_ by Sage Jiraiya.

Yamato owned the entire series, including a few special edition re-prints.

Yamato had gotten so lost in his thoughts about _A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay_ and _Make-Out Paradise_ that he neglected to notice Kakashi standing in front of him, idly waving a hand back and forth in front of his face.

“Yo,” Kakashi said when he finally snapped out of it. “Your stomach is growling. Wanna get dinner?”

Yamato blinked a couple times and agreed before his brain had finished catching up.

 

It turned out that Kakashi’s driving was just as reckless when he was in an actual car on an actual road. He still drove with a limp wrist at 11:30 on the steering wheel, but Yamato found himself gripping the sides of the seats because they weren’t in a golf-cart; they were on a road not a sidewalk, and Kakashi was driving 40 miles an hour. Kakashi kept asking what Yamato was so tense about, but Yamato was too busy bracing for some inevitable impact to answer.

However, they arrived to dinner in one piece, but Yamato was too dazed from the declining levels of adrenaline to notice what kind of diner it was or even what he ordered. But once his nerves unwound themselves and Yamato managed to grab onto the string of conversation Kakashi was spinning, he was enraptured.

Yamato quickly learned more about Kakashi than all those paperback romances novels had taught him. It turned out that Kakashi owned seven (or was it eight?) dogs, lived on the outskirts of town in a cabin built over 80 years prior, had read nearly every book that their store had in the romance and erotica sections, didn’t really care if the smut he read had gay or straight couples but definitely preferred stories with mixed-gender threesomes, had gone grey prematurely and, as Yamato had suspected, was actually only a few years older than Yamato himself.

Yamato didn’t talk much, just smiled softly into his plate with occasional glances up and realized he was halfway through his dinner but wasn’t even tasting his food.

Most importantly, Kakashi tugged down the neck of his sweater whenever he ate. Yamato had never seen anything below the man’s cheekbones before, and now he was seeing nose, chin, smile, lips. His brain had stuttered and stumbled and nearly come to a stop when Kakashi’s long, calloused fingers first dug into the fabric and fully revealed his face; his thought process only came back into focus when Kakashi unceremoniously shoved a handful of fries into his mouth.

Kakashi’s lips, Yamato noticed, were pink and chapped (the latter wasn’t surprising considering how he always kept is mouth hidden from the world) and somehow inviting even with catchup smeared on them.

Yamato promptly decided that this was the worst situation he’d ever gotten himself into and wished that he could disappear into the booth of what he quickly realized was a grimy truck stop restaurant.

 

When Kakashi dropped Yamato off at his car, Kakashi’s single visible eye crinkled at the corners in what Yamato could only assume was a smile. He got out of his car for some reason, leaning against the rusty dented door, and lingered there while Yamato launched himself towards his own car as casually as he could manage. It was only once there was a solid seven foot distance between them that Kakashi’s shoulders sagged and he got back into his car.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kakashi said through his rolled-down window, one arm hanging casually out of the car. His fingers were scuffed and calloused and had a few bandages that made Yamato wonder what Kakashi did in his spare time, other than read. His face was covered up again with the turtleneck, and Yamato wanted to rip it back down and do something reckless.

But Yamato wasn’t a reckless person.

“Yeah,” Yamato muttered back as he fumbled with his car keys and racked his brain for tips on how to drive. He hadn’t drank anything except water, but he felt dizzy and warmer than was healthy.

 

That night, Yamato lay in bed and stared across his studio apartment at the bookcase shelf holding all those damned romances and erotic novels until he fell asleep.

 

Three weeks later, a group of surly teens spilled into the bookstore and caught Yamato’s attention immediately. Kakashi was presumably browsing the newly-published romances and was nowhere to be found.

Yamato always tried not to assume the grungy teens were thieves. After all, Kakashi was grungy and trustworthy. Probably.

But these teens seemed more suspicious than the usual. They kept their heads down and tried to avoid any notice despite how conspicuous they were. One had a snaggletooth and a skateboard, another had bright red hair and looked like he could start professional cage fighting if he felt like it, and the third had dyed her hair hot pink.

Yamato waited until they had walked past him, then casually started following them around the store, keeping his distance but never losing track of the group. He tried to eavesdrop, but their whispers were too infrequent and quiet. He peeked around corners for any sign of Kakashi. As expected he was nowhere to be seen. Probably taking an extended bathroom break, or sleeping in receiving (which always caused such problems for Sai, poor thing).

Yamato rolled his shoulders and turned back to the task at hand. These teens were casually, but deliberately, making their way to the music department, where some of the highest-cost items were.

He only caught three words from the girl—“distract the guard”—but they were enough to confirm his suspicions. When they were just five rows away from the music department, Yamato stepped in front of them.

He smiled. “Mind if I checked you bags?” he asked while gesturing to the backpack the skateboarder had flung over his shoulder.

“Fuck off,” the snaggle-toothed skateboarder sneered as he stepped back behind the burly ginger.

Yamato tapped the radio on his shoulder. “Kakashi, I could use some back-up.”

The radio crackled back a few seconds later, “Don’t talk like that, you make us sound like cops. Besides, I’m busy.”

Yamato rolled his shoulders again and cracked his knuckles. “I’m going to have to ask you three to leave the store.”

“Make us!” the girl called out from behind the two boys. Yamato cracked his knuckles one final time.

 

It turned out that the three hooligans hadn’t stolen anything, and despite his protestations, the manager refused to call the police on them. However, the big ginger one had punched Yamato at least twice before Yamato subdued him, which earned him a lifetime suspension from the store.

Just as Yamato was escorting the three innocent troublemakers to the door, his radio crackled again. “Hey can you call Iruka over to music?”

Yamato squeezed his radio and hissed into it, “Where were you ten minutes ago? I needed your help, I got punched. Twice!”

The radio crackled some more. “Wow, I figured you could handle those three. Sorry if I was wrong.”

“Of course I could handle them—what are you even talking about? How did you know about them?”

“Just call Iruka and come back to music.” Yamato could nearly hear the smile in his voice. Yamato fought his own smile and schooled his face back into something more neutral before he pulled Iruka out of the manager’s office.

“Yo,” Kakashi said as Yamato stepped into the music department. His eye was crinkling with a smile and Yamato could easily imagine the accompanying grin behind that turtleneck mask.

“Why are you sitting on one of the kids, Kakashi?” Iruka asked. He folded his arms over his chest and glared. Iruka had always been very defensive of, even motherly towards, his employees and Kakashi was, indeed, sitting on one of the employees. Specifically the angry brooding music clerk. Kakashi seemed rather proud of it.

“Those three he got tangled up with were just a distraction. This idiot—” Kakashi knocked at Sasuke’s scowling face with his foot “—was trying to steal $500 worth of shitty horror movies. Apparently they’d planned to send the both of us chasing after the three outsiders while Sasuke packed up his backpack and left for the day. Although to be honest, since he works here, he definitely could have stolen these movies without such a flashy and badly formulated plan.”

Kakashi’s eye crinkled again before he jumped to his feet and bowed before Yamato.

“However, I will admit that while I figured out much of his plan on my own, he also revealed some vital information during his interrogation.”

“Like what?” Yamato asked, shifting his weight to the side and putting a hand on his hip.

Kakashi blinked so earnestly Yamato felt like it might have actually been a wink.

Iruka had already dragged Sasuke to his feet and was yanking him towards the back offices.

“Oof, poor kid. Iruka’s gonna give him quite the lecture. And fire him, I assume. I hope he doesn’t burn the store down in retaliation or something,” Kakashi said nonchalantly.

Yamato watched as Sasuke tried to free himself from Iruka’s death grip on his ear.

“But,” Kakashi continued, “Like I was saying, I learned some interesting stuff from my interrogation.”

Yamato turned to face Kakashi, who was leaning back with his hands in his pockets.

The corner of Kakashi’s eye crinkled again. “He just mentioned, in passing, what some of the employees here were buying.”

“Why would you even ask him something like that? That’s an invasion of privacy, and—”

“Your reading choices aren’t as vanilla as I always thought they would be. Honestly, actually taking my recommendations? How’d you like _A Billionaire Dinosaur_ —”

Yamato’s face was burning as he grabbed Kakashi’s wrist and dragged him through the store to one of the supply closets.

“Oh how sweet, now you’re trying to act out scenes from—”

But Yamato slammed him into the closet and closed the door behind them.

It was a smaller closet than Yamato had expected, and there was virtually no floor space with the vacuum sharing the room with them. Their breaths were mingling, and for a second Yamato wondered how Kakashi managed to keep his breath smelling decent while covering half his face with a turtleneck. Light bled in under the door, but Yamato couldn’t see anything even as his eyes adjusted. But judging by the body warmth he felt, Kakashi was standing only a few inches away.

“My reading choices are my own business,” Yamato said sternly, “and definitely not something to be discussed on the sales floor in front of customers.”

“You’re blushing.”

“It’s dark in here, how on earth can you tell that I’m blushing?”

“You just admitted it,” Kakashi said in a sing-song voice that set Yamato’s nerves on edge.

“I can’t believe you.” Yamato turned around to open the closet door, but felt Kakashi’s forearm press up against his hip as Kakashi reached for the doorknob and held onto it.

“Kakashi, move. Let me go. We can’t waste our time in here, we have incident reports to fill out—”

“Will you stop talking about work for one second? Jeez.”

“Of course I’m going to talk about work, we’re at work.”

“I couldn’t even get you to talk about yourself when I took you on a date.”

Yamato could feel his face reddening again. He realized that his hip was still pressed against Kakashi’s forearm, but when he tried to step away he found that there was nowhere to go.

“…That supposed to be a date?”

“Yeah. So how’d you like _A Billionaire Dinosaur_?”

“It was terrible. Probably one of the worst ones you’ve talked me into buying. That was a date?”

“I thought you were old-fashioned when you didn’t go for a kiss, but I figured you at least knew it had been a date.”

Yamato covered his face with his hands. “Oh my god.”

“Don’t act like you don’t stare at me all the time. I read romance novels. I know how this works.”

“Oh my god,” Yamato repeated, hands still covering his face.

Yamato felt the pressure of Kakashi’s arm against his hip fade away, and for a wild second he considered slamming into the door until it broke and running. Yamato couldn’t begin to fathom why he found Kakashi attractive when the guy presumably never bathed.

Although, to be honest, standing this close, Kakashi didn’t smell bad. He smelled like pine and dogs and something untamed.

Long calloused fingers pried at Yamato’s hands, and he resisted for a second before letting Kakashi pull them away. Kakashi guided Yamato’s fingers to the rough cloth of his turtleneck and left them there, nails catching on the loose threads in the weave. Yamato looked down and all he could see in the pale light was their shoes: his own standard-issue boots and Kakashi’s dirty high-top sneakers.

Yamato sighed, pulled the turtleneck down and away from Kakashi’s face, and leaned in to kiss him senseless.

Within a moment Kakashi’s hands were tangled in and tugging at Yamato’s hair—coincidentally Yamato had been planning on getting a haircut after work, but now he was positive he wasn’t going to do anything rash like that anytime soon—and a step backwards earned Yamato a doorknob in the hip. He pushed forward, into Kakashi and away from the door, and they quickly upturned what sounded like buckets and slammed into the vacuum. One of Kakashi’s hands moved out of his hair and came to rest of Yamato’s hip, and then Yamato knocked an elbow into a shelf with such force the entire thing collapsed.

Yamato pulled away. “We’ve gotta clean this up, we’re making a mess, we should stop—”

Kakashi slammed his mouth into Yamato’s once he had growled out “I’m not done with you yet.”

Yamato felt like he was going to melt in the best way possible.

 

Iruka was standing in front of the closet door with his eyebrows furrowed when Yamato stepped out. Kakashi stepped out after him, whistling a casual tune and straightening out his sweater.

“Uh.” Yamato said.

Iruka folded his arms and kept staring.

“We. Uh,” Yamato continued.

“We were having a private meeting. You know. Security guard stuff. Very important. Actually we need to be having more meetings like this. Can we get our own office? A security guard office. With a locking door.” Kakashi offered helpfully.

Iruka sighed and turned to walk away. “Clean the closet up at least.”

Yamato ducked back inside the closet, and was very thankful when Kakashi followed him.


End file.
